1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a performance determination of medical imaging equipment installed in medical institutions such as hospitals and, more particularly, it relates to an image-quality control system for evaluating and determining the quality of medical images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, when the image quality of medical imaging equipment installed in medical institutions is evaluated quantitatively by the request from the user of the equipment, service companies of the equipment took phantoms to the installation site and collected the scanned-image data of the phantoms. The collected data was read (the contents of the images were observed) by experts in reading images and then the difference between the data and reference data was evaluated. The image quality was evaluated depending on whether or not it is within predetermined reference values presented in specifications for each type of medical imaging equipment.
On the other hand, the image quality of medical imaging equipment installed in medical institutions is often evaluated quantitatively by reading the data of scanned images of evaluation phantoms that servicemen took to the institutions into computers having analysis software and analyzing it.
When the result of the analysis is beyond the range of the reference values, remedies that are presented in manuals etc. by analysis item are carried out to maintain the standard of image quality.
The image quality characteristics of medical imaging equipment are very complicated and vary delicately. This is because medical images are reconstructed under the influence of the characteristics of many components and complicated processes until image generation and then outputted. Accordingly, in order to check the components to find the cause of the defect in image quality, it takes a lot of time to replace the components by trial and error and to validate it, so that medical imaging examination and diagnosis must be stopped for a long time. Furthermore, it was also disadvantageous that image quality depends on the technical capability of servicemen depending on their experience.